A short conversational video (transcript excerpt) in which Chris Collins and a co-speaker argue that service professionals must act as teachers—continually teaching, checking comprehension, and reinforcing fundamentals (inspections, walkarounds, customer connection). They illustrate this with anecdotes (a mentor’s advice) and cross-industry examples (football tackling) to show how neglecting basics harms performance.
Chapters
He said when they would tell people to think outside the box, it did not help them anymore. In fact, that just confused them more. It made it worse for them. And so he said the only way for them to learn it is to show them.
Yeah.
And it made me think about how often we overlook that in our industry in the sense that we don't think of ourselves as teachers. But you, you're a teacher. Like, most of what you're doing should be constantly teaching. Teaching, asking for feedback and comprehension, and then teaching and then comprehension and then teaching and comprehension. Right, right. Over and over and over again. And.
You know, I've said this before, but one of my mentors, Don Crevier, when I became a general manager, I'd never held a sales meeting before. And I'm a service guy, Right. So I'm from Fixed Ops. So he said to me, he said that that sales meeting that we just had on Friday is the same sales meeting I had 20 years ago at Something Something Ford. It's the same one that happened a year. Like, it's the same thing. It's about how we greet customers, the steps to the sale, the. You know, it's just about the process over and over and over and over again. The system, in a sense. Right. And that always kind of stuck with me is it's like you're not even today, we think like tablets and video inspections and all that, but all of those type of things are still an outcome of being able to do a good inspection. It doesn't matter if you're doing a video inspection, if you're not doing a good inspection.
That's right.
Right. And so it's the same thing with walkarounds. It doesn't matter if you're doing a walk around. If you're not connecting and making friends with the customer and building trust, it doesn't matter. Right. And so the going through the motions and checking a box is what happens if somebody's left to their own devices. Right. Yeah, they'll do a walk around, but a teacher is the one that gets them to do a walk around with the outcome that we want. It's getting them to do an inspection so that, you know, really does cover everything and is consistent and complete every time, taking the customer into consideration, you know.
Yeah. I think the teacher adds inspiration and understanding to why we do the little things that we do. So it's not just a box check. It's actually, oh, there's an end purpose to this.
And the one thing that I think happens in every industry, not Just us. This happens in professional football. This happens in restaurants. It happens on people trading in the stock market. It happens in politics. It happens in every single sort of career that is performance based is once we get to an elevated level, the first thing that we start to neglect is the fundamentals in football. It's the tackling. Yeah, right. Last year the Seattle Seahawks were terrible. We couldn't tackle. We're like third in the NFL. And run defense Also penalties, too.
Right? Those basic things.
Freelancing penalties. But we're all too, you know, we're all getting paid a bunch of money and we think we're, you know, but we forget that it's about tackling. It's about, you know, think about the wide receiver that starts to run before they catch the ball. Yeah, right, like. Or the wide receiver that anticipates the hit before they catch the ball. They don't end up catching the ball. They drop it. And so it's the same thing with us is the thing that we need to be teaching more than anything else is the fundamentals. And what do we overlook? We overlook how we answer the phone. We overlook how we describe a problem on an ro. How we put information into a repair order, how the technicians put their stories into a repair order. We overlook how we do a walk around. We overlook how we do an inspection because we start to think, oh, well, those are. Those are things that you should know. But the truth is that the magic and the gold is in how we answer the phone. It's in how we do an inspection. It's in how we catch the ball and how we tackle. And so teaching is about back to the fundamentals over and over and over again. Thanks so much for watching this clip of Service Driving Revolution. We're uploading new stuff every day, so make sure you subscribe and click the bell icon so you don't miss out. If you have a question you'd like us to answer on the show, call 8333 ask SDR and we'll answer your question on the show. That's 8333, ask SDR. For special deals on our books and training, head over to offers.chriscollinsinc.com now that's offers.chriscollinsInc.com I'm Chris Collins and I'll see you in the next video.
